


He should have known better

by Nyx (Astriea)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, making sense of Night Vale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 02:05:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1533641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astriea/pseuds/Nyx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He should have known better than to go to Night Vale. More importantly, he should have recognized sooner why he stayed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He should have known better

He really should have known better.  
He should have known better than to agree to take that research grant.  
The fact that no one had touched said grant in years should have warned him.  
The organization that had sponsored him wasn’t a college or a research organization but Night Vale’s city council; it probably should have made him question whether it was a ligament position.  
The fact that the town was called Night Vale, a name that in his opinion belonged in science fiction and not the real world, should have given him some sort of hint.  
He had no idea how right he was.   
When he tried to research Night Vale, his computer started lecturing him about personal hygiene in what he later learned was modified Sumerian.(He was still researching how that could happen outside of city limits.) Not only had this prompted him to spend a long time in the shower, it had also started five separate studies on that computer. None of the studies came back with any valid answers. Night Vale’s city council refused to be reached for comment.  
Instead of listening to his lab partner’s advice to “not even think about Night Vale again,” this event had just made him more determined to find out more.  
It probably was a good thing that he hadn’t been able to do that research; he still had enough common sense back then to say no from the morality rates alone   
Still, he could feel Night Vale calling. The call to the unknown had been singing to him all of his life. That was why he was a scientist after all; his job was to make sense of the unknown.  
Even now he was ignoring the likely hood that Night Vale had actually called him there.   
That was why, armed with a good understanding of science, reason and logic, a team of scientists from all over the country, and a basic knowledge of how the world works, he decided to go to Night Vale.  
During the first day, he lost half of his Scientist to the town being weird, he started doubting his sense of reason and logic and, he got teased for a local radio host’s crush on him. He also decided that he knew nothing about how Night Vale works  
After he decided that Night Vale logic and real world logic just were not the same thing, he spent months trying to figure just what exactly Night Vale logic was. When he decided that Night Vale just did not have any logic, having seen firsthand the mortality rate that this town had, he should have given up and gone home. Even if it was possible to communicate effectively with the outside world, he knew better than to think that he would be able to publish any of his findings.  
He realized this around the time that Dinosaurs showed up at a PTA meeting. Still, for reasons that he wasn’t prepared to admit because, if he stopped kidding himself, ‘for science’ wasn’t a good excuse and he knew it, he stayed in Night Vale.  
There was radiation that didn’t seem to affect anybody. Earthquakes that had no effect what so ever, Hooded figures in the Dog Park that he found himself ignoring, Angels that didn’t exist, blinking lights over the Arby’s. That wasn’t even considering the Radio Host who openly adored him over the air but couldn’t seem to stop stuttering whenever he actually talked to him. Of course when he talked to him, it was for science or the safety of the town, not ever, he would tell the Radio host, personal reasons.  
As the months went by, he started getting desensitized to the town. Not like he was accepting the totalitarian government, which he was at first frankly shocked was allowed to exist.   
He still thought that cover ups that ranged from telling people to ignore things to kidnapping people and stuffing them in mineshafts, along with being watched all the time by the Sheriffs Secrete Police, a not-so-secret organization that he sincerely hopped just existed in Night Vale. Not to mention, the vague yet menacing government agency, who had their own brand of corruptness for the town. These things were wrong. Not that the rest of the town had any problems with it.  
All through this, he worked on. While getting his life narrated by the Radio got embarrassing at times, seriously he was not that handsome and certainly wasn’t perfect, at least if the Voice of Night Vale liked him, everyone else seemed to.   
He was interested to see that Cecil’s influence didn’t seem to end there. Thanks to the radio host, people seemed to think that “the Scientist” was his last name. Even his lab assistants didn’t seem able to not say ‘Old Woman Josie’ or ‘John Peters, you know, the Farmer?’   
When trying to type out lab reports, he found out the hard way that even computers seemed to fall under Night Vale jurisdiction. He had yet to be successful to type ‘the dog park’ or ‘that shape in (censored, please stop trying this, we will not hesitate to send you to get reeducation.)  
Even though Steve Carlsberg was one of the few sane people in the town, Carlos had decided early on that he was indeed a jerk. He tried not to think about poor Telly, who Cecil had run out of town for cutting his hair.   
He was actually grateful that the Apache tracker was shunned by the town as a whole because he was a ‘raciest jerk’. He had to agree there, growing up as a minority group; he had dealt with more than his fair share of raciest jerks in his life time.  
Civil rights were still an issue in Night Vale. The fact that apparently “Ghosts can now marry, but can’t have children,” had put him in a bad mood for the rest of the day. He had sadly identified with the ghosts. When a lab assistant had asked him what was wrong, he had shrugged him off and given him some meaningless task. He hadn’t trusted Night Vale to not turn on him in an instant.  
Of course, that was when he had already learned about how ignorant Night Vale could possibly be. They swore up and down that mountains were not real. They denied that radiation posed any real danger. And yet they decided to remove the door on Radon Canyon because they could get lead poisoning. It just didn’t seem to occur to them how strange their town was.   
It sometimes frightened him how he was starting to think of Night Vale as normal. He stopped worrying about the fact that at least one officer from the Sheriff’s secrete police was watching him at all times. He made no effort to try to study the hooded figures. It frankly didn’t surprise him that Valentine’s Day was an annual catastrophe. Just as well, he wasn’t getting a date if he had yet to call Cecil for ‘personal reasons.’   
Feeling the reasonable part of him get smaller and quieter, he went on playing Hero.  
At least, that was until he collapsed in a bowling alley. When he woke up, he decided that life was too short and full of perils to keep kidding himself. He finally summoned courage to call Cecil for something other than science.  
When he sat with Cecil, watching the lights over the Arby’s, he finally admitted to himself that there was another reason why he was still in Night Vale. Now he knew better than to keep him away.


End file.
